The devil in 'portal to hell' case is a now-banned drug | Di Ionno

Three days before he attacked three people with a knife and hatchet from a shed where he was searching for the "portal to hell," Morgan Mesz picked up the family Bible and began reading.

The word "allegedly" is not in the previous sentence because Mesz's attorney, Mike Robbins, acknowledges "there is no dispute about what happened. The question here is about his state of mind."

On Jan. 7, 2011, Mesz attacked Carolyn Bunnell and Barbara Perrine, after they found him in the backyard shed of their Union home.

At the opening of Mesz's trial yesterday in Superior Court, Union County Assistant Prosecutor Albert Cernadas said Mesz "brutally attacked" the women with a "knife and tomahawk," and described their life-threatening wounds. Bunnell had a fractured skull and a severed carotid artery. Perrine had a cerebral hemorrhage, a chest wound and collapsed lung.

Mesz is charged with two counts of attempted murder related to the attack on the women, and a third count of attempted murder following a confrontation with Herman Agudelo, a neighbor who came to their aid. According to police, Mesz later told them he was in the shed because it was the portal to hell and he was digging down to save children.

In the first interview given by Mesz's family members, his sister, Amanda Nixon, said her brother's reading of the Bible "fueled his psychotic fantasy" brought on by use of synthetic marijuana, which was sold in convenience stores at the time but has since been banned throughout the country.

"He believed he was on a mission from God," she said. "He was going to the Lowe's to get some tools to do work for God, then has no idea what happened," said Nixon, a cardiac nurse. "We're not a deeply religious family - I'd say we're more spiritual - but when Morgan went crazy on this drug, I guess he saw himself as a warrior for God."

Nixon said her brother did not drink or use illegal drugs, but used the synthetic marijuana to help him to relax. It had "a calming effect," she said.

"He's a good kid, he really is," she said. "This stuff just made him crazy."

She added that her brother was "horrified" by the attacks and "extremely remorseful."

Since the attacks, Mesz, now 30, has been held in the Union County Jail on $1.75 million bail and could face what amounts to life imprisonment, if he is found guilty on all three counts.

It's a shocking turnaround in the life of a young man who had no criminal record, was a high school rodeo star and horse trainer in Montana,an accomplished amateur boxer, and who was known in his Union neighborhood as a person always willing to help.

"He was very handy and he would fix things for all the neighbors," said Magna Wagner, an elderly woman who lived across the street from Mesz.

"He was like a grandson to me, always helping."

The night before the attack, Wagner said Mesz was in her home for several hours and seemed to be having religious-based fantasies.

"I never saw him like that before," she said. "It was so unlike him. I don't understand."

"This is a tragedy on many levels," Robbins said before opening arguments yesterday. "What happened to these victims is a nightmare, a true nightmare, and nobody is trying to diminish that. It was a life-scarring event."

"But what happened to this kid (Mesz), too, is disturbing in its own right. He was under the influence of a dangerous chemical substance that was sold legally in a convenience store, sitting there next to the candy and chewing gum, which was banned (in New Jersey) nearly two years later because of incidents like this."

The generic term for the chemical is synthetic marijuana. It is a lab-made synthetic cannabinoid that even its inventor says dangerous. John William Huffman, an organic chemist at Clemson University, created it to better understand effects of natural cannabinoids on the brain. The research was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the idea was to do therapeutic good for people with HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis and certain cancers.

Of the 450 compounds invented over a 20-year period, one -- JWH-133 -- proved to fight brain tumors and some skin cancers in mice.

But the most notorious was JWH-018, which became the common ingredient in synthetic marijuana products called "K2," "Spice" and "Black Spice," mostly made in China and shipped worldwide.

Soon after, people began showing up in emergency rooms with delusions, convulsions, suicidal or murderous rants, self-mutilation and other hallucinatory psychotic episodes.

"The devil is a very consistent theme," said Karen Dobner of Aurora, Ill., in a phone interview. "They're either fighting the devil, running from the devil or say things like the devil has taken control of their hands."

Dobner was an early advocate for banning synthetic marijuana after her son Max, 19, was killed when he crashed his car into a house in Kane County, Ill., in June 2011. He, like Mesz, was one of the growing casualties of a drug that baffled parents and police.

"He was a kid who never did drugs, was an athlete and a great student," she said. "He was a perfect child, the last kid you would ever worry about."

Dobner began researching the effects of the chemical.

"I thought to myself, 'This is so unfair. This stuff was being sold as incense at gas stations and these poor kids had no clue.' They never knew what hit them."

Dobner pushed Illinois lawmakers for a ban and it came shortly after he son died. New Jersey banned the substance on March 18, 2013, two years after Morgan Mesz bought his last package of "Black Spice" from a convenience store on Ferry Street in Newark.

"Imagine, if this was banned two years earlier, none of this would have happened," Robbins said.

Instead Mesz went "crazy," as his sister said, and sought and found that "portal of hell" he was looking for - for his victims and himself.